After all, it had been a nice Christmas. Sure, Gramma had got stuck in another one of her endless loops and had retold the same story in the same words for the full evening (how she had once dared to enter the dangerous city and had then pulled the bus door emergency opener because she had been told to step out at the fifth stop and the bus halted in front of a traffic light), and Calamus's father had felt the urge to impress his family with his enormous vocal ambitus while singing Christmas carols which didn't have any. But in total, it had been nice to see the family united and even nicer to be left in peace again.

At last, Calamus had time to turn himself to things more important than human interaction. Such as pursuing a random point on the map.

It was Argovia again, which Calamus was by now able to note with only a slight twitch in his right eye. Argovians were perfectly normal and nice human beings, as multiple expeditions had shown, and their inability to drive carefully seemed to be confined to the city of Zurich for some reason. To adapt himself, Calamus even donned white tennis socks in order not to be racist (because all Argovians wore such socks at all times).

The fastest connection appeared to be via Lenzburg, a town just big enough to have a direct non-stop train from Zurich. It had once been the home base of the Counts of Lenzburg, whose extinction in the twelfth century is said to have been one of the factors leading to the forging of the Old Confederation. Only their castle remains, and Calamus had built a skewed model of the distinctive architecture when he'd been a child, which was still standing on top of a wardrobe in his bedroom, collecting dust. From Lenzburg, an intracantonal train brought Calamus to the village of Hunzenschwil. The wind and rain might have added to it, but it looked a little bit bleak. Calamus went off into the forest.

Even though Eich is archaic German for "oak", Eich Forest consisted mainly of pines. Its layout was particular, too: at some points it was so sparse that the light seemed surreally bright, and one step further it was so dense that Calamus couldn't see further than a foot and had to get his lamp out midafternoon.

After he had come as close as the path allowed him, Calamus entered the undergrowth. Of course, the lucky devil had unwittily chosen the path with the widest range of thorny inflexible spike plants. If he'd been a botanist, he'd have been overjoyed to hang suspended from a possibly rare and most interesting rosebush-like species. But he wasn't, so he tried to save what could be saved of his clothes without damaging the shrubbery.

After a few more minutes of flora fighting, he reached the point, and after taking a picture, he looked for an easier way out. There was one, completely thorn-free and with no obstacles whatsoever.

It was getting dark rather quickly now. Calamus returned to Hunzenschwil. The purchase of a nut croissant took long enough to make him miss his train, so he enjoyed an overpriced but good café mélange in a tavern.

He had considered staying in Lenzburg for a moment, but since the train to Zurich was standing there already, he decided to postpone the exploration of Lenzburg until the next time a hashpoint was there, the chances for which are almost 2‰ each day, resulting in a 50% chance for it to happen in the next year. But probably it wasn't going to be accessible, or he wouldn't have the time to fetch it. So Calamus quitted his inane mental arithmetic and boarded the train.